🐰 A rabbit is not a rodent — check behind the front teeth

Rabbits, hares and pikas are lagomorphs, not rodents. Look at the roof of a rabbit's mouth: behind the two big upper front teeth sits a second, tiny pair — nicknamed peg teeth. A mouse or a squirrel has only the one pair up top. Four upper front teeth instead of two: that is the easiest way to tell a lagomorph from a rodent.

Basis: Mammal classification: “Lagomorphs have a pair of incisors in each quadrant of the upper jaw, one large and rodent-like, and the other a small peg located immediately behind the larger tooth.” (Animal Diversity Web, University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, order Lagomorpha).

Those front teeth never stop growing — and their enamel, the hard white coat, wraps all the way around the tooth, while a rodent's incisor has enamel on the front face only. So a rabbit spends its day grinding tough, fibrous food, and that side-to-side chewing is what keeps the teeth worn back down.

Basis: Same source: lagomorph incisors “grow throughout the animal's life and have a layer of enamel that extends around to the posterior surface of the tooth (in contrast to rodent incisors, which have enamel on one face only)” (Animal Diversity Web, University of Michigan Museum of Zoology). On wear: rabbit teeth are “elodont (for their continuous growth with no anatomic root),” and wild rabbits “select foods high in fiber and silicates which require exaggerated horizontal movement and appropriate wear of the clinical crown” (MSPCA-Angell, “Dental Anatomy and Disease of the Domestic Rabbit”).

Here is the part that makes kids say ewww: a rabbit makes two kinds of droppings. The dry round ones you see are waste. The other kind — soft ones, usually made when the rabbit is resting — are richer in protein and B vitamins, and the rabbit eats them straight away. Grass is hard to unlock, so a rabbit sends the meal through twice.

Basis: Rabbit nutrition: soft (night) feces are “much higher in protein and water and lower in fiber than hard feces,” and eating them “provides the rabbit with B vitamins and protein”; by re-ingesting them the animal recirculates those nutrients (Michigan State University Extension, “Rabbit Tracks: Feeds and Feeding”).

So why do rabbits show up in a farm count at all? Farms raise them for meat, for fur pelts that go into clothing, and for the fluffy wool of Angora rabbits, which spinners turn into yarn. The government's farm census counts those rabbits — the pet rabbit asleep on somebody's sofa is not in the table.

Basis: Cooperative Extension guidance on raising rabbits: rabbit meat is “very palatable, high in protein and low in fat, sodium and cholesterol,” and “the fur pelt is used in a wide variety of products, and soft, fine Angora rabbit wool is prized by spinners and fiber artists” (University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service, “Raising Rabbits in Alaska”).